Elmhurst Hospital is at the epicenter of the city at the epicenter of the global pandemic. lisaxmiller spoke to an emergency-room doctor struggling to keep it together — and find supplies
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That night, the storerooms had run out of all but the largest-size masks for some of the breathing machines, so the masks kept slipping down the patients’ faces, increasing their annoyance and discomfort and causing the clinical staff extreme distress, because every loose or fallen mask meant more virus escaping into the treatment room and required a hands-on fix, an actual nurse or resident approaching a patient and touching the mask, the face, and the mask again.
For the most part, Wolfe has been content to be a shift worker, to give more than 100 percent at the hospital and then leave it behind. But she sees that is no longer possible. What she’s going through now will change her in ways she cannot predict or plan for. “There will be an overwhelming amount of sadness and death and loss. I’m not emotional in my care of patients. But when I give bad news to families, when the game is over, I know this is their worst day.
Wolfe tries to be in control of her terror, but reality makes that hard. In Italy, health-care workers account for nearly one in ten COVID-19 cases; 100 doctors have died there since the outbreak began. One of her closest colleagues at work is in his 50s and has asthma: “His wife texted me. She is hysterical and rightly so,” while he keeps on “making jokes about his life insurance.” Another colleague is on immunosuppressants.
Intubation itself is hazardous to physicians to perform because the spray from the patient’s throat goes everywhere, like a sprinkler, creating an invisible infectious cloud. In an ideal world, intubation for highly infectious diseases would occur in a negative-pressure room, where contagious microorganisms are sucked out of the air, but in the context of the current reality, it’s impossible for every pop-up treatment room to be outfitted this way.
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